{"id":94,"date":"2011-05-08T07:18:29","date_gmt":"2011-05-08T01:48:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/ipi.org.in\/blogs\/?p=94"},"modified":"2011-05-09T15:48:44","modified_gmt":"2011-05-09T10:18:44","slug":"early-morning-musings-on-mind-brain-time-and-coffee","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ipi.org.in\/blogs\/early-morning-musings-on-mind-brain-time-and-coffee\/","title":{"rendered":"Early morning musings on mind, brain, time and coffee"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Early morning thoughts stream slowly and meander leisurely through the mind without much of discipline.\u00a0Yesterday I fixed a new mirror in the bathroom. The old mirror is still laying next to it. Seeing them both, I remember the adventures with “mirror-books” that Fynn describes with so much love in\u00a0Mr. God, this is Anna<\/em>. With some apprehension I\u00a0hold the old mirror in front of the new one. Such tricks rarely work for me, but the effect is immediate. An infinite series of mirrors inside mirrors pops up. And it is true: the mirrors appear so quickly that it is hard to resist the impression that they have actually always been there, that I just peep into a pre-existing reality. Anna is right, there is something magical about this.<\/p>\n

Several old thoughts get triggered. “How quick must something happen to give the impression of simultaneity?” And from there, “What does it mean that there is a difference in the length of ‘now’ in vision and hearing?” I have never heard anybody else bother about this, but I find it intriguing. Children learn in school that the length of time the eye needs to discern a difference is \u00a0somewhere between a thirtieth and a sixtieth of a second. Movies and TVs are based on this, but I don’t remember ever having learnt anything about the length of “now” in terms of sound. Musicians and sound-engineers must have studied it, but I haven’t stumbled on any writing about it. I’ve noticed that my own auditory “now” seems to last about a second and a half. Beyond that stretch of time, my sound perception tapers off gradually into the past as well as into the future. It is as if I watch a river: water flows into my field of vision from one side and flows out from the other. I see sharp only what is in the middle. Is the length of the auditory “now” a biological constant or is it something that can be trained to expand? Do musicians hear a whole concerto “in one go”, as one piece? Or do they move, like me, through the music as if they were looking at a parade through a vaguely bordered slit or window? However precisely I may know how the parade looks as a whole, I still can\u00a0see<\/em> only a few marchers at a time. Does everyone hear in the same manner? Or can the borders between knowing and perceiving shift? Or blur?<\/p>\n

The thoughts withdraw, there is silence again. I make some coffee and watch a bit of milk fall into the cup. While I see it falling, there is another fleeting thought: “Should I add a bit of sugar?” I see my mind’s eye move to the sugar pot and back within the tiny bit of time it takes the milk to fall a centimeter or two. Now another train of thoughts follows.<\/p>\n

“How long does a ‘fleeting thought’ actually take? The image came and went while the milk fell at most 2 cm, judging from the size of the cup. From physics class I remember\u00a0that free-falling objects speed up during their fall, so I should take into account that the milk must have been falling already for another 20 cm or so. With some embarrassment I realise I’ve hopelessly forgotten how to calculate how long falling those 2 cm should take, but it must have been a small fraction of a second. (A bit later the formula comes back, it and I guestimate it should have taken something of the order of 10ms). The time it takes for a signal to pass from one brain cell to another through a chemical synapse is similar, about 2 ms. I wonder whether this observation is sufficient to conclude that thoughts and consciousness must take place within single cells. Probably not. I should try to find out whether it is possible for loads of slow working cells to produce together complex results in a short timespan.<\/p>\n

“The image of adding sugar and the words in which that suggestion was clad were vague. Could it be that such thoughts arise simultaneously in a number of individual cells and that a thought becomes more precise, detailed and solid as and when more cells get involved? Could this offer a hint on the process through which intuitions and ideas from more subtle vital and mental planes enter the physical brain? Could it explain why some scholars think consciousness goes together with certain frequencies of coordinated brain activity? In the field of “Consciousness Studies” people tend to look at consciousness as the ability of the organism as a whole to react to stimuli, and that type of consciousness might indeed need the whole brain to work in unison.<\/p>\n

“And all this, while consciousness in the Indian understanding can exist without any brain at all….”<\/p>\n

The whole train of thought lasts hardly a few sips of coffee. It takes almost two hours to write it all out. Was it worth it?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Early morning thoughts stream slowly and meander leisurely through the mind without much of discipline.\u00a0Yesterday I fixed a new mirror in the bathroom. The old mirror is still laying next to it. Seeing them both, I remember the adventures with “mirror-books” that Fynn describes with so much love in\u00a0Mr. God, this is Anna. With some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_bbp_topic_count":0,"_bbp_reply_count":0,"_bbp_total_topic_count":0,"_bbp_total_reply_count":0,"_bbp_voice_count":0,"_bbp_anonymous_reply_count":0,"_bbp_topic_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_reply_count_hidden":0,"_bbp_forum_subforum_count":0},"categories":[12,11],"tags":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ipi.org.in\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ipi.org.in\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ipi.org.in\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ipi.org.in\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ipi.org.in\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.ipi.org.in\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":99,"href":"https:\/\/www.ipi.org.in\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions\/99"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ipi.org.in\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ipi.org.in\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ipi.org.in\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}